


Lost & Found

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Charlie is alive for no particular reason except I want her to be, F/F, anyway I just wanted to write some life-affirming fluff for Mary and then this happened, everything is based off canon aside from the obvious, technically a coda fic for 12x06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 22:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9291755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: Mary hasn't felt right since she got back, but a chance encounter at a bar changes everything.





	

Mary hunts. It’s all she really knows how to do, she thinks. Monsters are easy. They don’t change, the world is still as full of awful as it ever was. She can do something about that.

She picks up the trail of some ghouls almost by mistake, following an old lead from John’s journal just out of curiosity as she traces his steps, and comes across unsettled graves that abruptly end an aimless walk and turn it to work. She buys a machete in town and it feels comfortable and familiar in her hands. Knives haven’t changed much either since she was dead.

After that she starts keeping a much closer eye on local newspapers in the towns she passes through. She’s probably being reckless to take on a vampire nest alone but she doesn’t know anyone she can call for back up except her own sons, but it feels mechanical, easy, to work her way through the vampires. She feels detached from it, but it’s still some good, some change in the world that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t done it. A reason to be back and alive. To make this count.

The reaper, Billie, had shaken Mary with her words. It had felt like a wake up call. Mary knew she had made her decision to live, but finding what that actually meant…

It was easier to glance up at the nearly-full moon and start putting together a trail on a probable werewolf case. A series of three different ghosts in successive towns after that.

She isn’t exactly running from anything, but she isn’t ready to slow down either.

The next lead she follows is a bust, though. It’s probably Mary’s fault for not learning to use the internet and relying on old newspapers, this one left on a diner table. By the time she makes it to town, the strange disappearance has been exposed as nothing more than life insurance fraud, and the “missing person” found and in custody along with their accomplice, and all the strange details that made the crime scene so compelling in the old headline waved away, nothing to do with ghosts or witches or body-snatching monsters; just incompetent scammers.

The bar in town is loud and crowded, but the types of people who frequent them haven’t seemed to change much in all the years she’s been away. Well, the number of men with buns has changed alarmingly; people are glancing at the bright rectangles of their phone screens noticeably often, and the only free table is in the corner, beside one hogged by a woman using the bar’s own power sockets to charge several devices at once.

Mary rolls her eyes at this but gets a drink and heads over to the empty table. She is probably just as bad – if not about stealing electricity – for spreading out newspapers and maps and the journal across the table, trying to work out where to go next. Still not ready to think about heading back towards Kansas… not yet…

“Oh! You’re a hunter too!”

Mary turns to look over at the woman at the next table – peering at her from behind the glowing screen of her little red computer, the same shade as her hair. Perhaps Mary is frowning too deeply at the intrusion – the woman bites her lip and glances from Mary’s face to the knife on her belt that gave her away, and back again, contrite. “I’m sorry, not that you probably want random people talking to you. And I’m not even really a hunter – well sort of but I’m retired now, officially, just I happened to be in town when things seemed to be getting weird and – I’ll shut up now. Sorry for rambling!” The red-haired hunter trails off into a barely audible squeak, she’s become so high-pitched.

“It’s okay,” Mary says, trying to smooth out her frown – it’s become her default expression and she keeps catching herself doing it in mirrors and windows, and having to will it away. “I wasn’t expecting to meet another hunter here but it’s not unwelcome to have someone to talk to.” She turns in her chair, elbowing the journal back and trying to open up her posture to be less of the surly untalkative hunter in the corner and more someone she actually wants to be. “Were you here for the ‘locked room’ mystery?”

“Caaa-razy, right? I went all over the house with EMF and then I thought, you know, check his latest online activity just to see if there was a hint in his behaviour, and whoops, busted. I dropped off all the info to the police anonymously… I guess it’s for the best there wasn’t anything to do here. Like I said, I didn’t even really want to hunt anything…”

Mary shrugs, thinking she’d have liked a real challenge to distract her. Not that it’s this woman’s fault for taking away that chance – Mary would have found nothing but frustration here either way. “You said you were retired? You must be younger than me…” She flinches at her own words, because that concept is too messy to figure out so casually, but pushes on: “What made you decide to get out?”

“Well, being dead for a bit really changes your view on the world, you know?”

She knows she’s failed to keep afloat in the conversation and conceal her reaction of shock written plainly across her face, when the other hunter’s expression changes to awkward pity. “You too, huh?” she asks, and like that Mary is crying into her hands, ashamed that she’s suddenly lost it in front of a complete stranger, but unable to stop. She hadn't realised until then what a fine thread she was holding it together by.

She hears a chair scrape across the floor, and a hand awkwardly pats her shoulder. “Hey, um… How about I get you a stronger drink – uh…”

“Mary.”

“Mary. Okay. I’m Charlie. I’ll be right back, okay? Uh – watch my laptop for me, okay?”

She manages to get herself under control by the time Charlie returns. She sits at the same table as Mary, now, but wavers nervously beside her, clearly uncertain about how to offer comfort, twisting her hands in her lap after bottling out of what looked about to be a hug.

“It’s okay,” Mary says, maybe just to the universe at large. “It’ll be okay. I’m sorry for breaking down like that.”

“Hey, I’m not judging. Sounds like you needed it. It took me a few months to get my head together afterwards as well…” Something in the grimace Charlie offers suggests she doesn’t think she has it fully together now, either.

“I have a lot to process,” Mary admits. “This has been a very confusing couple of months. It feels like I lost everything from my old life, and what I have left… it’s strange.” She glances self-consciously at the journal she’s pushed aside. It’s not just losing John – or what he did since he lost her. It’s her sons as well. But she has no idea how to even begin to explain that. Charlie seems like she belongs in this time, with her phone and laptop and tablet piled up together beside a careless tangle of wires. There’s something haunted about her eyes, but she doesn’t seem lost in time.

“You just feel like you need to put some space between you and that old life, I get it,” Charlie says. “I think I’m sort of on the run too, even though the people who killed me are all dead now.” She frowns, looking uncomfortable for a moment, like there is more she would say but chooses not to. “I don’t know if I can face anything from my old life either… But you know the stuff that goes bump in the night is out there. It’s hard to put that behind you when you think people might be getting hurt.”

“Yes, of course,” Mary says. “I tried to put hunting behind me before I died, but it all caught up to me, and I’m not sure I ever really was _retired_ so much as off-duty. This might be all I’m good for after all…”

“That can’t be true,” Charlie interrupts, smiling more gently now, eyes searching over Mary for some proof of this. “You seem really nice and… nice…” she trails off, her cheeks turning pink, and takes a nervous gulp of her drink.

Mary looks away, feeling her own face warming up at the earnest kindness from Charlie. She pulls at the longer strands of her hair, twisting them around her finger. It’s strange to her to feel so pleased at flattery like this, but Charlie tripping over her tongue to deliver the compliment is oddly endearing, and Charlie’s making her smile, with a cheeriness that it seems she can’t help reverting to.

“But hey, if you need to hunt to cope with things… Maybe… Maybe I can help out. Find you stuff to do on the internet… No offence, but it’s a lot faster than digging through newspapers and stuff. I have like a dozen google alerts set up. Then I can feel like someone’s on the case, and you can work through stuff the old fashioned way – hunting zombies or whatever… Or I should just get you into video games if you need zombies to kill.”

Mary looks at the pile of electronics Charlie has accumulated, and thinks of the phone in her bag – it runs out of charge every day, it seems, even when she doesn’t use it, and trying to explore its features is a vast and terrifying challenge, once she leaves behind the relatively obvious parts of using the phone like a phone.

“Maybe you could teach me a few things about how to use computers,” Mary admits. “All this modern technology… It’s sort of overwhelming.”

Charlie doesn’t seem to notice the “modern” Mary accidentally let slip, but beams at her. “Yeah, I could. Um, my place is just in the next town over… If you’ve got nothing else to do here, we could go back there, and I could show you some stuff. If you like!”

“Yes… I would like that.” Mary weighs her words carefully, feeling like Charlie is placing a lot of weight on this decision, especially when she turns pink again and looks altogether more relieved than Mary would have expected.

“Okay! Let me just… gather up all this stuff…” Charlie gestures vaguely at her own table.

Mary nods, already pulling the journal further out of sight. She tucks it into her bag without daring to look at it again, and shoves the maps haphazardly on top, still partially unfolded, burying it. They finish packing up at about the same time, and Charlie makes a chivalrous gesture for Mary to lead the way out of the bar.

*

Charlie’s apartment is nearly bare and she’s either just moved in or never furnished it properly – the only things that look new and expensive are the television and related stacks of future (no, present day) stuff piled on the floor around it and connected by a confusing mess of wires. The sofa looks scavenged, with large throw blankets shielding the worst of its stains from view, and there’s not much more furniture in that room. The kitchen has a table for one, and the only countertop appliance is a coffee machine.

“I’m still getting settled,” Charlie says from the kitchen, glancing over her shoulder as she gets them more drinks, and catches Mary looking around critically. “Uh, it’s a bit hard rebuilding your life from scratch.”

“I know. This bag is all I really have,” Mary admits, dropping it beside the sofa. “You’re already ahead of me.” She sinks down onto the sofa as a sign of good faith – it’s far more comfortable than she expected, and the apartment smells clean, which is the important thing.

Charlie re-joins her, handing over a beer bottle. She darts over to the television and comes back with two odd-shaped devices, as the screen powers up behind her.

“So, you wanna kill some zombies and blow off steam since we didn’t get to hunt anything for real?”

Mary takes the offered device carefully; it’s a very strange remote control. “I don’t know how to use this,” she admits. “I’ve never done this before – ”

“It’s okay, it’s easy. You must have good reflexes, right? That’s half the difficulty curve in these sort of games. I’ll show you…”

She curls up on the sofa, against Mary’s side, and leans across her to adjust her hands on the controller, moving her thumbs to the right place against the clusters of buttons. Charlie feels warm, and real in a way that not much has to her since Mary got back. All her physical contact that hasn’t been fighting things has been awkward, terrified hugs between people who can hardly believe she’s there, who she barely understands as her own children. There’s no demand here, no reason not to just lean against her in turn.

Charlie isn’t asking her for anything but to try and understand how to make the figure on the screen move around, keeping up a relentless sunny chatter of encouragement as Mary gets the hang of the controls. She cheers when Mary manages to kill a practice zombie under her guidance, then lets go of Mary’s hands to pick up her own controller, fingers brushing slowly over Mary’s as she goes. Mary lets out a sigh before she can make sense of what she’s feeling, and Charlie hesitates for a moment, and then settles back against Mary’s side with her own controller in hand.

Mary finds she gets progressively worse at the game, distracted by the way Charlie constantly elbows her as she plays, and shakes against her side with laughter at all the terrible ways Mary’s character gets devoured by the zombie horde. Mary takes each lull in play time to look away from the screen and smile apologetically at Charlie, though she doesn’t seem to mind how bad she is at it, meeting Mary’s eye and grinning, and offering to avenge her character’s untimely end.

After a few dozen times of this frustrating yet fun ritual, Mary forgets to look back at the screen, even though the cue to play again has come and gone.

Charlie’s smile is even more impish than before, and Mary’s still wondering why she looks so victorious when suddenly Charlie leans across the short amount of space between them, and presses her lips to Mary’s.

Mary jerks back in alarm, dropping her controller. Charlie looks horrified as Mary struggles to her feet.

“I’m sorry! I thought you wanted to – Fuck. Sorry.”

Safely removed from the sofa, Mary tries to calm down, pacing in circles looking from door to sofa, aware that she can hardly hear through the blood pounding in her ears. She touches her lips almost distractedly, replaying the moment Charlie leaned in, the swoop her stomach made before the shock of the contact jolted her to her senses. She _knows_ that feeling, the excitement and sudden _want_ of an offered kiss… Its familiarity is what lets her stop pacing, and face Charlie properly. Her face is already almost entirely hopeful by the time Mary can bring herself to speak.

“I think – I think I did too. I mean, I wanted – I’ve never done this before.”

She hadn’t really thought that she _could_. But John is long gone, and the world has changed. This frightens her in a very real way, but that feeling itself is different, in stark contrast to the numbness and confusion and dream-like state she’s been in. She had felt safe with Charlie, comfortable…

“It’s okay,” Charlie says, like she’s soothing a frightened animal. “I can show you, if you want… Or we could just cuddle. Or we can play some more of this game, or…”

Or Mary bottles out and runs back into the cold and she has to go find a place to stay at going on one thirty at night, probably only to lie awake thinking of this moment forever. And how she may never be brave enough to intentionally seek something like this out again if she misses the chance now.

Mary takes a tiny step back towards the sofa. “I – I just lost my husband. This last month. I never… we were teenagers. I never got to live my life at all.” She snorts the last part as a laugh that gets too snotty in the middle, and finds the tears are back. She lets Charlie gently take her hand and pull her back to join her on the sofa, and this time she seemed less scared to touch Mary, gently smoothing back her hair from her face with shaking fingers.

“It’s okay if you’re not ready. You’re cute and all, but if you’re still mourning, I understand…”

“No… No no no, he’s, um, he’s long gone. I feel like I hardly knew him, now I look back on it. I just… I didn’t know this was an option. Until right now.”

Charlie nods, eyes sliding away as she thought things through, gnawing her lip. “Well, I’m all for helping you experiment and discover yourself and all that jazz, but if you get freaked out or want to slow things down…”

Mary rolls her eyes at that and leaned in to return the favour of the surprise kiss before Charlie could worry a hole in her lips. Charlie doesn’t jolt away – she buries her hand in Mary’s hair, catches her by the hip and pulls her closer, opening her mouth to Mary’s kisses to encourage her to kiss back deeper.

It doesn’t take long under they’re bowled over to lay back on the sofa under Charlie’s gentle pushing.

She’s smaller than Mary, but wiry and strong in a way Mary hadn’t expected from the hunched up, anxious way Charlie tended to hold herself while she was clearly unsure about where this interaction would go. Mary can feel her energy and enthusiasm in every movement now – she’s almost crackling with anticipation but holding herself back, hands skimming down Mary’s sides, brushing so lightly back up again that Mary shivers against her from the potential of that touch.

Charlie asks with her fingertips if it’s okay, if Mary’s ready for this, and Mary nods, and shivers, and moans her appreciation as Charlie kisses her again, and Mary kisses back, chases the thrill she’s not known since she was a teenager of building something new with someone, learning how they kiss, how they touch, how they _like_ to be touched. She dares to explore further with Charlie, until Charlie sits up, straddling Mary’s legs and laughing, her shirt missing, bra askew. She struggles to unclasp it and drops it over the edge of the sofa, and sits there grinning down at Mary, half naked, her hair a mess, and a gleam in her eye as she examines Mary in a similar state of debauchery.

Mary’s shaking from the experience already, her fear completely disappeared with how natural and easy this seems, how much sense it makes to cup a soft breast in her hand and roll the nipple between her fingers, or to feel long hair brushing over her chest and stomach as Charlie kisses a line from her neck to her belly. She knew, vaguely, that women did this – not women she knew, or at least more than sometimes trading kisses as best friends to practice for when they’d have “real” boyfriends…

This doesn’t feel like a game, when Charlie’s fingers play with her belt buckle, teasing it open slowly. It is overwhelming, but making her feel something wild and hot that she felt she hadn’t _really_ known since John had last sweet talked her into the back seat of the Impala. Decades ago. It feels like it. She arches her hips up to let Charlie pull her jeans away, shuddering in anticipation as Charlie straddles her knees, and runs a finger under the plain elastic of Mary’s underwear, thoughtful and teasing as the contemplative smile on Charlie’s face.

“I’m going to be honest,” Charlie says. “It’s been a long time. Like, hundreds of years, long time. Messy ex, being in the middle of a civil war in Oz, all sorts of drama. I really, _really_ , just wanna go to town on you if that’s okay.”

“Y-yeah, okay?” Mary replies, not entirely sure how to make sense of the personal information Charlie had just shared. “A-are you human?”

“Uh, yeah. Just, um, spent some time in a fairy realm. Time’s different there. Are _you_?”

Mary nods. “I’ve been dead since ’83, though.” she confesses.

“ _Nineteen_ eighty three or -?”

“Um, yeah. This century.”

Charlie laughs. “Damn, well I still beat your dry spell by maybe seventy years then, if it was a competition.”

Mary bursts out laughing along with her, and when they fall silent, Mary feels a warmth inside her that’s nothing to do with the heat and tension that’s been building between her legs since Charlie first handed her a game controller. She hasn’t laughed like that for over thirty years on the calendar. And who is she to question Charlie’s implausible story when she has her own. It seems like they were meant to find each other, to find solace in each other.

“Please, can we…?” She shifts her hips impatiently.

“Oh hell yeah,” Charlie says. She lifts Mary’s leg over her shoulder, kisses her way down the inside of Mary’s thigh, and then there’s not much chance for more conversation.

*

Mary wakes up with first light, restlessness or old instinct she can’t tell. She’s warm, comfortable, curled protectively around Charlie’s slight figure. It feels right, in a way that unsettles Mary’s world in ways she knows it will take her months to get her head around. But changed as she may be, Mary can’t ignore the feeling that she has to move on, that there’s more ground she has to cover, more she has to deal with. The temptation to stay here and never leave is exactly why she has to. She hasn’t talked to her sons in over a week, even by text, despite her promises to do better at it.

As soon as she sits up, Charlie rolls over, cracking her eyes open.

“Are you freaking out? Please don’t be freaking out… S’too early.”

“No – I… I just have to go. Have to be on the road…”

“Right now?”

“I’m awake now.”

Charlie huffs groggily. “Fine, I can put some coffee on.” She slides out of bed, and shuffles off towards the kitchen, still naked. Mary averts her eyes for a second before realising that she just spent several hours not long ago learning every inch of that body and how Charlie liked to be touched. She lets her eyes linger, following the tattoo, until Charlie has left the room. Mary gets up and follows, realising her clothes are all still flung around the sofa anyway.

At the door she makes up her mind, and follows Charlie into the kitchen space, where she is just finishing starting the coffee. Mary presses against her, sliding arms around her waist and hooking her chin over a shoulder.

“I don’t mean to leave you behind and never see you again,” Mary says, and the stiffness disappears from Charlie’s shoulders. “I _want_ to see you again.”

“Well, you know where I live… If you’re nearby… I’m basically always down for it. And I’ll give you my phone number. You know how to work a phone?”

“Kinda. I’m learning.”

“Well, the phone bit’s the easy part – learning not to clutter it up with all the games in the app store… That’s the hard part.”

Mary blinked as Charlie laughed. “I’m sure that made sense to you.”

“Oh, I’ve taught someone who is a real dinosaur to use a phone properly – you’ll be no problem after him. C’mon.”

She leads Mary back to the living room, and when Mary’s found her phone in her discarded jeans, pulls her to curl up on the sofa, taking one of the throws from the back of the sofa to cover them with. Mary rests her head on Charlie’s shoulder, now the one cocooned in her arms from behind, and watches as Charlie holds the phone in front of them so Mary can see what she’s doing.

She enters her own number and laughs sympathetically at Mary’s contacts list. “You have even fewer numbers in here than I do… Do you know how to add their names?”

Mary looked at the very short list of numbers above ‘C x’ as Charlie had just entered herself. “I just learned which numbers were which.”

“Well you know how to add names now, so you can do that later. Here, lemme show you the wonders of apps…”

*

Mary leaves mid-morning, still dazed, but feeling a bubble of happiness that she hopes will hold her up and make the rest of her quest more bearable. Even as she stands by Charlie’s door, taking a kiss for the road, she thinks of returning, letting Charlie teach her to play more of her video games, to learn more about Charlie. Maybe to share some of what she’s going through when it’s less raw and easier to voice.

She has no idea how she’d bring up this strange but brilliant lover with her sons. She thinks she would be more hesitant to tell them if she’d abruptly ended up in a man’s bed. Or, is this better, that Charlie couldn’t possibly remind them of what they’d lost, good or bad?

When she steps out into the sun with her bag over her shoulder, all she really knows is that she feels like for the first time since she got back, she’s found a bearing.


End file.
